On Creating a Corporate Culture of Fear

Are employees in your organization afraid?

If so, as a leader new research should give you a reason to worry. This month the Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience published a research article entitled:

"Learning fears by observing others: the neural systems of social fear transmission"

in which the authors discovered "...that fear acquired indirectly through social observation, with no personal experience of the aversive event, engages similar neural mechanisms as fear conditioning."

Which essential means that if your organization supports a culture of fear it will impact the bottom line. For example, if employee "A" has a run-in with an emotionally dysfunctional leader, not only will employee's brain begin to re-wire into a fear response, other employees's brains will also begin to re-wire into a fear response.

Fearful employees are emotional UNintelligent employees. Fearful employees are at higher risk of becoming emotionally disengaged with your organization, which creates a signficant drain on your organization's bottom line.

For those readers who are interested, you can read the full abstract of this important research article here.

BOTTOM LINE: Any Organization with a Culture of Fear is an Unprofitable Organization.

The Integral Equivalent of Teaching Emotional Intelligence...

A Norwegian TV show recently posted this very funny skit on YouTube. My IT colleagues who work at various HelpDesks find it hilarious. From an integral coaching perspective, I find the same thing happens when I'm coaching people in building their Emotional Intelligence...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek

Enjoy a laugh today!

:-)

Tim

A Ph.D. in .....what?!?

A colleague recently told me that she was going to get her Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship ...

... and she's never owned a business.

Is it me, or is that a little weird?

She's going to learn about the rigors of the marketplace by sitting in a classroom and writing a dissertation?

IMHO, she'd be better off starting her own business.

Everyone who has owned a business for more than five years qualifies for a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship.

Living for the 70's....

When I consult with organization, sometimes the process requires me to interview various employees up and down the management chain.

I was recently consulting for a mid-size company, and as I walked around I consistently heard employees proudly say:

"We do things here the same way we did them 30 years ago!"

one variation even went:

"We do things the same way we've been doing them for years ... except that we have email now!"

(Honest. Someone actually said that.)

Um...............

See the problem?

Unless you're a maker of 70's fashion, doing things the same way you did them 30 years ago is a serious problem. Processes that are 3 decades old are not points of pride--they are red flags that something has been seriously missed.


BOTTOM LINE: Emotionally Intelligent leaders listen carefully for signs of stagnation in their organization. Stagnation means the same thing as "someone else will eat our lunch".

Harry Potter as Leader

To learn more about the leadership qualities of Harry Potter (and to read my predictions about "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", the final book in J.K. Rowling's best-selling series), visit my blog about Harry Potter here.